deepstreamHub blog

Inline with deepstream's enterprise clustering AMI going live on AWS marketplace, here's an overview of the various features it offers.

Okay, let's face it. For most of deepstream's existence, a lot of you have been clueless about this feature we call 'listening'. Well, let's break it down in this post.

Great news!! We just added token based authentication on deepstreamHub. What this means is that you can now let the users of your application login using a token, thus not having to enter their credentials each time they wish to use your application.

We couldn't be happier to announce that we just added a feature that let's you collaborate on your deepstream applications with friends or co-workers.

You all have known, used and loved our presence API. We understand that it's a very useful API, hence we added a bunch of new features to it.

At deepstream, we always look out for interesting applications developed with deepstream’s realtime features. After toying with the idea of organising another office Hackday, we decided to make it even more exciting and host a contest instead. So, two months ago, we launched our Home Security contest on Collaborizm.

Lately, I almost got worried. Whenever I looked around our office in Berlin I saw this strange combination of exhaustion and focus that so often precedes a major milestone in development.

I’m terrible with secrets. I’ve always been. Back when I was still working in corporate land, I gave our receptionist a run for her money when it came to gossiping — and trust me, this is saying a lot.

Want to send a request to a server and get a response back? Use HTTP! Simple as that. But when it comes to managing communication via persistent, bi-directional connections, e.g. WebSockets or TCP you’re looking at one heck of a choice.

HTTP is coming to deepstreamHub! Our upcoming HTTP API will allow any HTTP capable programming language or device (so pretty much everything) to read, write and delete records, send events or make RPCs using a simple JSON format.

Announcing the release of deepstream.io 2.4, which now supports running deepstream as a daemon and registering itself as a service via init.d or systemd.

We are super excited to announce the release of deepstream.io 2.3! It contains quite a few radical improvements that are aimed to provide developers the tools to cater for more complex use cases.

Meet Christian Nwamba - a JavaScript preacher; building the web with the JS community

deepstreamHub, our upcoming realtime data platform lives in the AWS cloud, a solid foundation for the project to grow. When it was time to set up a proper production environment, we decided to create a new AWS account to start from scratch without unnecessary configurations or components.

Realtime is growing fast. From collaborative edits in Google Docs, chatting on Slack or auto-synced Trello cards to fully fledged trading platforms, multiplayer games or smart home controls, more and more apps are using bi-directional connections and streaming updates to deliver data as soon as it becomes available.

One rainy day we ventured across land, air and sea to the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, for the monstrous ‘techsperience’ they call Web Summit - where we basked in the sunshine and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Microsoft, Facebook and the odd escapee from Hollywood.

For months now deepstream.io has been navigating the rough waters of open source - and to some extent successfully so. As a long-term PR professional but first time dabbler in open source community management I'd love to share what I learned along the way.

The recent demise of RethinkDB has not only send shockwaves through the open source community, it also got its wider ecosystem thinking.

When we started, we were a small team of investment banking and trading technologists with an ambitious goal: we wanted to build the best trading platform there was; fast, responsive, with a multitude of tools, clever workflows based on multi component linking, browser and mobile support, easily accessible, themeable and so on...

Ever thought of how nice it would be to unearth insights about your in-store customers - as easily as you can with online analytic tools? Obtain specifics on who’s shown up, the peak opening hours, repeat customers, how they navigate your inventory and how long they’ve been in the store?

What have you’ve been doing at work today? Your actual work? Or sifting through an endless stream of emails, both from externals and co-workers alike that wanted to discuss - well - even more incoming emails they’ve received.

If you're an AWS user, you've probably seen the big news today: Elastic Load Balancer has taken a big step forward and now supports HTTP/2 and WebSockets on a protocol level, rather than having to route packages directly.

Loadbalancing for Websockets sucks. But I guess we can't complain. HTTP has been around for 27 years and we had plenty of time to develop a mature infrastructure to handle traffic for even the biggest websites.

Time to build a realtime app. Whether it's just a few notification popups or a fully synchronized collaboration app, you’re probably doing the right thing - users have come to expect to see changes happen when they happen - not just once the page is refreshed.

Let's face it, we each have multiple user profiles and maintaining all those different passwords just never worked. So when OAuth got introduced we let out a sigh of relief knowing those days are behind us. Behold, the second sigh, where deepstream can use the same OAuth-tokens to authenticate your users!

Ever since we started working on deepstream.io, our open source realtime server, we’ve felt that it could be the foundation for something bigger: a platform that enables developers of all backgrounds to build stunning realtime apps. A platform that connects to a wealth of tools, services and third party systems. A platform called deepstreamHub.

Not too long ago, this post would have started with a flaming manifesto for microservices. “Break down the monolith!”, “Divide and Conquer!”… you know the drill. Today though, that’s hardly necessary. In fact, cloud platforms like AWS make it next to impossible NOT to architect your backend as a swarm of loosely coupled processes.

Realtime systems have a reputation of being expensive to run. Lets take a look at why - and what we can do to make it better. But before we start, let’s take a quick look at how many realtime systems work today.

As the guys behind deepstream.io we spent an awful lot of time at conferences and meetups with cool names like up.front, 12min.me or HackNTell. And we talk to an awful lot of people. What do we talk about? You’ve guessed it: Realtime technologies.

Writing this feels almost irreverent. Parse.com was a great platform and despite its stability issues one of the most innovative and clever technologies in the realtime space. It was one of the great inspirations for deepstream.io and it took us very much by surprise to see it being shut down.

A few years ago, when the first Rasperry Pi’s hit the scene, I was working at a tech company building trading apps. Like so many, the company had a strong focus on engineering with about 70 developers pitted against just 4 designers.

Writing a deepstream client only requires a TCP connection, basic string manipulation and a bit of JSON parsing. This means it can run on any hardware platform with any programming language. And to prove it I’m going to attempt to get it working on an Arduino uno!

ending the same message to Smartphones, Email inboxes and VoIP clients on an Amazon scale? Sounds great! And that’s exactly what AWS’ Simple Notification Service lets you do. It’s a realtime-pub-sub-hub that lets you fan out the same data to AWS services like SQS or Lambda as well as to a wide range of connected devices.

Ever since we’ve started working on deepstream.io, we’ve been toying with the idea of using it to build something bigger: A platform that makes it easy for developers from all backgrounds to build great real-time apps, using their own data as well as live feeds from a myriad of services.